Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue pictures and hands-on

Huawei has announced another 7-inch Android device, and is being very clear that this is a tablet. There's no confusion over it being a giant phone, or calling it a phablet - except, of course, that you can make calls on it, so it's all of the above, if you want it to be.

But the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue behaves like a tablet and it feels like a tablet, unlike the Sony Xperia Z Ultra, which looks and behaves like a phone.

We say the MediaPad 7 Vogue behaves like a tablet because it lands running Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean), but you don't get the swipe-down notification area or access to the settings at the top of the device as you do in Android 4.2, so everything is accessed from the bottom right-hand corner, which isn't the most convenient.

While we're on the topic of software and the user interface, this comes with Huawei's Emotion UI 1.5. It's not too offensive, but we notice that one of the things you lose is the apps tray icon. It looks as though Huawei wants you to have your apps spread across the home pages instead.

There's also a range of tweaks across the device, which we're yet to fully investigate in our initial exploratory play with it, but we'll bring you all the details once we've worked up a full review.

On the hardware front, there's a 1.2GHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM. Internal storage is only 8GB, but you can expand this via microSD to add up to an extra 32GB.

The display measures 7 inches on the diagonal, which isn't the highest resolution around with 1024 x 600 pixels, so relatively mid-range. Our initial impression from the IPS display is that the colours are nice and vibrant, but with so much screen real estate, there's not quite enough brightness to keep things punchy in strong sunlight.

But the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue feels good in the hand. It measures 193.8 x 121.3 x 9.5mm and weighs 335g in the 3G form we have here. The build quality is good and the design is easy on the eye. It reminds us of the HTC Flyer, HTC's much maligned tablet of 2011, with the two-tone silver and white around the back.

The MediaPad 7 Vogue comes equipped with support for 3G networks, as well as Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. There's GPS to enable navigation and everything is powered by a 4100mAh internal battery.

We're going to get to work on giving the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue a thorough testing and will have a full review for you as soon as we can.